I’ve gotten a couple of requests (hey b&s!) to put warning labels on graphic posts in the future. I’ll definitely try to do that, but I thought the best thing at this point would be to try and push the last post down the page a bit. And, in case you’re wondering, the finger is doing really well.
So, I was laying awake in bed this morning, home from my early morning class and trying to get some sleep before my afternoon classes, but the high school kids from the two high schools on either side of my building were sitting in the street yelling and laughing and I was fairly unsuccessful in my efforts. I was super tired, though, so even with all the noise (damn kids should get off my lawn!) I was managing to drift in and out of sleep. And somewhere in between waking and sleeping it occurred to me what the best comparison for my job is.
The best classes are ones where I show up, set a topic, introduce some useful language or structures, and step back to observe what the students make of it. The trick is to set the original constraints such that the students will be interested in them and become engaged with them and use them to create interesting new things that I never previously anticipated. I was thinking about my morning class, how I had used a video podcast from the Onion (In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex^), and how I had been able to design some activities that really got them talking and how they were actually able to teach me a few things as well. The premise was that we were learning how to talk shite, how to hold a conversation when you knew nothing about what the other person was going on about. Needless to say, some of them were already experts in doing this in Spanish and, with a little effort, they were able to transfer this ability over to English. Everyone really enjoyed themselves. The students were speaking to each other for almost the entire class and, apart from some upfront work coming up with the original idea, I really didn’t have to do much except listen and note down some errors for a short error correction slot at the end.
Of course, in my field, this is known as The Communicative ApproachTM, which is the pedagogical theory du jour and the professed goal of most language schools / teacher training programs; the main idea of this approach is that the focus of the class should be on the students, not the teacher, who should ideally be able to blend into the background. But what I realised today is that it is also the goal of every Web 2.0 application developer: create an app that people will find useful and interesting, lay some ground rules, provide some simple and easy-to-use tools, and then step back, let the users create what they want, and provide moderation only when necessary and in small amounts. In my half waking mind, this was a super exciting idea. I had pictures in my head of a community of linked users, round-cornered pastel-coloured buttons, user-driven tagging systems, and Ajax interfaces. And somehow all of these things were floating over, maybe superimposed on, … no, fully integrated into my physical classroom space. I was imagining myself standing in my classroom, watching as my students interacted with my app: jumping into a light pink button, traveling down a pathway, following links to related data, creating new paths as they moved through the system. It really was a beautiful sight.
Hey, anything to get you through another day, right?
